You can use audioBoom or Yappie to upload voice recordings. After that you can contact someone at lang-8 (http://www.hackingchinese.com/using-lang-8-to-improve-your-chinese/) to get feedback.

You can do this on https://www.hinative.com which is also available as an app.

Thanks! I think accent is mostly about identity and intention rather than actual skill or knowledge. I have never lived in an English-speaking country and thus haven’t had many real people to use as pronunciation models. However, I’m quite sure that if I found a good model and decided to sound like that person, I could achieve it without too much problem. It’s just that doing so would feel… weird, like, not being me or something. I’ll probably experiment a bit with this once I care less about Chinese than I do now. 🙂

(Not studying Chinese: just interested in the way you use Audacity).

You seem modest about your English pronunciation, but as a (British) native speaker, may I assure you that it sounds fine. While it’s obvious you aren’t a native speaker, I wouldn’t say there are any “mistakes” as such. It’s very pleasant to listen to.

Best Wishes,
Mike.

Maybe we all don’t want to show that “imperfect” side of us… hard to say.

I think you hit the nail on the head there. Even though I do my very best to be open-minded about receiving feedback and so on, I do feel a bit uncomfortable putting my own Chinese (and English) for that matter online. I think it’s a matter of editing. I put all my Chinese texts online (here), which feels much more okay for some reason. Voice and speech are more personal and harder to edit afterwards.

However, I think this is stupid, we really should be more open with what we do. I’m working on a “best performance” article and that will contain myself trying my best to read Chinese aloud. The reason why I hesitate to publish a random recording of myself trying to read or say something is that that would be very, very far from my best performance. I don’t want people to listen to that and say “oh, so if that’s the best he can do, his Chinese sucks”. If everybody else posts their best performance, the guy who posts his worst performance is likely to be perceived as not being very good at Chinese, whereas in fact, the opposite might be the case.

Still, this is incredibly stupid. Why care about what other people think? Exposing one’s mistakes online is an excellent way of receiving useful comments and help with how to progress. I’ll go work on that reading and see if I can’t get the article online before the end of the semester. Thank you for your comment and inspiration!